The long-awaited new version of WordPress has been brought to the masses. Version three of the award-winning software is now available for download at wordpress.org.
At Canary Dwarf, we have been eagerly awaiting its release. We started playing with the first beta release last month, and we liked what we saw. So much so that we started using it on a couple of projects currently in development.
Key improvements are the new menu building feature, something which clearly promotes it to a serious content management system (CMS) rather than just a blogging tool; and its ability to run multiple sites.
And when they say multiple, they mean multiple. WordPress quotes up to 10,000,000 sites can be run of one installation. That’s nice to know!
The team at WordPress have named this release Thelonius, comparing it with the jazz giant Thelonius Monk whose “Improvisational wizardry inspired us to new heights of customisation”.
Canary Dwarf is working with WordPress on a daily basis and we use it as a CMS already for some of our clients and in-house projects, such as Moray Firth Live.
Because WordPress separates content and design so cleverly, we find it a great tool to use for customers who have varying budgets.
Now, with version three, less coding will be required to build custom menus, headers and backgrounds, and we can provide training for clients to manage more of their site themselves.
We call this the agency/client split and it means our clients can decide how much involvement they have in the management of their content and design in accordance with their budget. We can provide training for those with lower budgets, and management for those with more to spend.
WordPress is already the most downloaded website creation software and 20 million people are using it around the world. It is rapidly becoming a serious player for business websites, and it just got a whole lot better with version 3.0.
And of course its open source, which means its free to download, use and edit. And while Canary Dwarf does charge for customising it, being free to us is a major benefit to our clients’ bottom lines, and making it easier to use and customise helps a bit too.
Expect to see lots more of the Big W spreading across the internet soon.
Quick off the mark
We never look back on the day we chose to partner with StudioPress, a leading supplier of Premium WordPress themes. It was only hours after the release of WordPress 3.0, that StudioPress launched an upgrade to their brilliant Genesis WordPress theme framework, which integrated the new custom menu features. Nice work team.